doubt truth
by stupidbloodyidiots
Summary: Following The Angels Take Manhattan, the Doctor finds a reset button in the annals of the TARDIS.


Doubt thou the stars are fire;  
Doubt that the sun doth move;  
Doubt truth to be a liar;  
But never doubt I love.

_Hamlet_

* * *

He's never used the reset button.

Mostly because he doesn't know what it does.

Almost a millennium ago he discovered it, exploring his new stolen spacecraft; a tempting red circle, the lettering embossed in Gallifreyan. He had thought about pushing it, but he had been afraid. He's still afraid.

He trusts the TARDIS like he hadn't then, when they were learning one another. Which is how he ends up back in the room to begin with: he rounds a corner, and there it is, paint fresh on the KEEP OUT sign as if centuries haven't passed. His ship is trying to tell him something.

The button, mounted on a black pedestal, is the only item in the windowless metal chamber. "Fanciful suggestion," he says aloud, and the ship creaks in reply.

A week ago he left a graveyard in Manhattan with a friend of his. Just the one friend, which felt a little lacking. And River's more than a friend, on some days, but he can't think about that now—he can't think—

He feels love; he feels its complexity, he feels the layers of it shifting across one another, tectonic plates in his chest. Wonders if one heart can love more than the other, or if one loves in a different way, and is that the reason? Is that the reason it's all so irreconcilable? His desire to have her here, and his crushing wish that he never lays eyes on her again, for fear he'll crack her into smaller and smaller pieces, until she's dust—second go around, he may even take away her happy ending, and all for wanting it to be _theirs._

This, him now in the reset room staring at the button and really _really_ thinking about it, thinking about risking everything to forget—this is desperation. He doesn't know how far back the button will take him, or if it will take him anywhere at all. The universe could default to the big bang, and everything would occur as it had the first time, and he wouldn't be able to stop himself from killing and running and falling in love. He'd never know he had a second chance. And Amy would die, as she was always going to, and she would die in a graveyard in Manhattan because she'd have realized what he is.

_Very old and very kind_. One of those is true, he muses.

She infuriates him. It took her too long to see his cruelty, but he would have waited forever. He would have kept her from seeing it, he would have let her convince him it wasn't true. This is not the first time after a companion's departure that he's imagined a house in the suburbs, a wiry black fence, a sink in need of fixing. Cats, teatime, morning sex. Wanting it would be foolish, but imagining it is another beast altogether, and one he can keep on a long leash.

He considers sex, considers ringing River, who was often willing and always able. But perhaps that was inappropriate, to make that sort of appeal when he's just been thinking about—though it wouldn't be the first time those wires have crossed, because they're so bloody _similar_, aren't they, his sometimes wife and his—

The other option, of course, is that the reset button will know where to take him. To a week earlier, to the graveyard, where he will warn them all. And she can be with Rory if it's what her heart desires, as long as she's on this ship, and he can feel her warmth through the psychic pores of the TARDIS as she lies in bed, her long hands fisted into the sheets with some nameless frustration. As long as she's here she's his.

Or perhaps it would take him back further still: to the nights after Rory vanished from memory and it was just the two of them, with her pain pulsing somewhere underneath them, but he prefers to remember that time fondly. Selective recollection, his old friend.

Twice in the course of that period had he thought, radically, devilishly, _maybe_. They'd left the Musee d'Orsay for the third and last time, and he'd gotten her a handkerchief from the closet. She looked at him then with nothing but love in her eyes, an overwhelming and childish feeling, but they had only ever played at adulthood to begin with. She'd found it in herself to love him still, after everything. Selective recollection, their old friend. But he hadn't moved to meet her that night, invite him as she did with the loving look, and the soft question in the part of her lips. _Doctor?_ He had let her be.

And then, after his visit to Craig, when they were reunited, there was the hug so tight he thought their muscles might ache when they untangled themselves from each other. He had thought later that night that they might get tangled again, and he knew she had thought this too, and more than once; the two of them of them would make a smallish knot, hardly conspicuous or of harmful note to anyone, and they'd make it just for life's sake because there will only ever be one Amy Pond, even if there are twelve or twenty or a million Doctors. He'd paused outside her door and realized that some knots are irreparably tight, and so he had walked away. He's the furthest thing from a hero, heros don't concern themselves with the escape.

It bites him in the arse, doesn't it. His need to run away.

He's too scared to even try. It's more conceivable than he wills himself to believe, the suburbs and the fence and the sink. It's one watch away, on the chain in his waistcoat, and god, _Amy_—

In the console room she'd confronted him with a great tome from his library, _The Anatomy of the Time Lords_. Back when she was young, trying to pin down her new friend and probe him indelicately, to see and know him in his entirety. _Very old and very kind_: she had wanted to understand him, like the transparency would close the gap between them.

"You can stop being a Time Lord, if you want," she told him, too excitedly. "You can just pop yourself into a little thingy for a day and stop everything. It sounds brilliant, not having to…" (She'd been thinking about Leadworth and her wedding dress, he now knows.)

He'd asked her, "Why would I ever want to stop being a Time Lord?"

Oh, Amy.

He traces the circumference of the reset button.

And slams his palm down on it, as hard as he can.

* * *

a/n: potentially the first of a series. done for a prompt, "reset button", given to me by tumblr user gillank.


End file.
